


We Be-Lung Together (Or That's What Everybody Says)

by domestictrash



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Medical, M/M, Medical Professionals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-24
Updated: 2017-06-24
Packaged: 2018-11-18 15:13:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11293269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domestictrash/pseuds/domestictrash
Summary: Prompt: jongin is a paramedic and yifan is a doctor at a hospital, and everyone thinks they should be dating but they're oblivious. but the way they smile and stutter and stumble and blush around each other is completely obvious.





	We Be-Lung Together (Or That's What Everybody Says)

**Author's Note:**

> This ended up being a little more dramatic than I think the prompter had envisioned, and if so, I'm truly sorry! It just happened to be the way the story developed for me. 
> 
> I was the only editor, and I had major writer's block about halfway through, so do excuse any errors in continuities/details that seem off/typos that I didn't catch.
> 
> I hope I've done your vision justice. It's also my first time writing for EXO, so it was nice to work with some new names and characters!
> 
> Most of all, just thank you for reading!

It is two in the morning, and Yifan really should be sleeping.

He’s got work in the morning. He’s exhausted, he virtually just got off of a shift. The unending list of reasons why he should just close his eyes and go to sleep run like the banner at the bottom of the evening news, constant and completely ignored, as he continues to scroll through Facebook. In retrospect, scrolling is a strong word. “Virtual loitering” would better describe it.

His thumb idles over a picture of a smiling group of EMTs, their arms slung over each other’s shoulders as they stand in front of their ambulances. His eyes gravitate towards the second man from the left - young, slender, tan skin and dazzlingly white teeth. His eyes are crinkled up into a smile, and his neon orange suit almost gives the impression that he’s glowing. Yifan sighs and swipes left.

The paramedic’s name is Kim Jongin, and Yifan barely knows him. In real life, that is. Through what little he can glean from Facebook, he’s an awfully good paramedic who has a penchant for fried chicken and an ass that looks great in tight, bright orange pants. If he weren’t so fucking strange, Yifan would have the courage to walk up to him at the end of his shift and say something along the lines of “Every time I see you, the ATP in my muscles forgets to break the crossbridge between my muscle filaments because you’re so attractive, please go out with me.”

But he’s a much better Facebook stalker than he is a conversationalist, so he contents himself with pictures of Jongin the paramedic wearing circle glasses and drinking coffee instead, giggling like a teenage girl out of his cuteness.

⇲

Yifan’s nursing a lukewarm cup of coffee. He’s finishing up ER case reports - an old lady’s broken clavicle, a six year-old’s allergic reaction, a man’s gunshot graze - when he hears Sehun’s snarky voice come to life over his radio.

“LooOOOVER-BOY,” Yifan cringes, “Your gorgeously tan and medically-trained Adonis will be coming through door 6 with an asthma attack! Get the air hooked up and pucker up, because you’ve got 4 minutes til ETA!”

Before he gets a chance to reply, the radio - and the gaggle of nurses on break outside his office - start buzzing with gossip. Amid the oohs and aahs of the med students, the cruder comments of the ER nursing staff shine through - the crudest one being Jongdae’s, who shouts when you gonna tap that EMT ass big boy as he walks by with the gauze cart.

Yifan manages to walk down the hallway to the ER maintaining a fraction of his dignity - there are people who work on this floor that don’t have a radio. He still has to evade the occasional heckles though (read: Sehun), so by the time he’s gotten to the ambulance drop-off, the paramedics are already unloading the sixteen year old wheezing into a ventilator. She’s not critical by any means, a little albuterol and a stern reminder not to forget her inhaler at home will do the trick.

Jongin’s holding the gurney’s front end, one hand holding the mask to her face, the other steadying the cart. He looks up from the girl to see Yifan standing at the door, stethoscope in hand, and breaks into the biggest smile. “Hey, Dr. Wu! It’s your shift today?”

“Today and every day,” the doctor mutters back, trying and failing to keep his smile casual and his gaze off of Jongin’s ass.

“You act like that’s a bad thing,” Jongin responds, skillfully hoisting the girl off the gurney into the bed with Kyungsoo. Yifan’s stumped and doesn’t answer, dumbly pulling out his stethoscope to check the patient’s heart beat. “Details?”

“Student at Daewon. Her health card says allergy and sports-induced asthma; we picked her up when she couldn’t catch her breath after gym.” Yifan hums in response, taking her pulse, sitting her up to listen to her back.

When he’s done, he turns around and finds himself practically chest-to-chest with Jongin.

Jongin’s cheeks are bright red. It’s always a bit toasty in the ER. “So,” he murmurs, “when does your shift end?”

“N-not for a while,” Yifan stammers back, madly fidgeting with the stethoscope hung round his neck. Jongin’s smile falters a bit, but his blush doesn’t subside.

“Oh, well, I’m - I’m on break now, so”

“Ah...are you-”

“Yeah, I’m going home.”

“Sleep well, then.”

Jongin chuckles. “The life of an EMT, huh?”

Yifan doesn’t know how to answer that. He settles on a tight-lipped smile, but Jongin’s already walking away.

Yifan turns around to walk back to his office. He doesn’t see the other paramedics, Kyungsoo and Chanyeol and Joonmyun, crowd around Jongin as he walks out, whooping and laughing and making fun of his tomato-red cheeks and his hopeless crush.

⇲

Kyungsoo is much less optimistic than the others. “Dying alone isn’t that bad, apparently,” he says matter-of-factly. Chanyeol’s sitting next to him on the bench in the back of the ambulance, swaying slightly with the bus. They’ve been married for three years, and were together before that for five.

“You’d never know, though, would you?” Jongin snaps.

Chanyeol narrows his eyes, trying to be mean but totally incapable. He’s tall, lanky, and dorky, the complete opposite of Kyungsoo - short, muscular, with the most straightforward personality he’d ever met. They met during school, and Chanyeol stuck to Kyungsoo long enough to pass his paramedic course and get Kyungsoo to like him. They’ve been together ever since. Jongin is jealous, to say the least.

“Well I suppose not,” Chanyeol replies smugly. He hooks his arm around Kyungsoo’s waist and pulls him closer.

“Any tips then? I’m going to go crazy if nothing happens soon. It’s been like two years already, and I’ve gotten nowhere.”

Kyungsoo furrows his brows in thought. “Honestly, Chanyeol just kind of wormed his way into my schedule to the point where I couldn’t get rid of him.”

Chanyeol indignantly pokes him in the side. Kyungsoo relents with a smile, “But it was your charm that really did it, naturally.”

Chanyeol ruffles his hair, and rests his hand on his husband’s neck as they continue with the conversation. Jongin can’t really focus on anything they’ve said though, because he’s too busy thinking about how nice it would be for Yifan to do that to him.

A voice crackles from the radio at the front of the ambulance, immediately followed by such a sharp turn that they all nearly fall off the benches. It’s a kid with a broken leg - and as much as he hates himself for it, Jongin gets really excited, because Yifan’s trained as a pediatric surgeon, and he knows for a fact that he would never miss this case.

Kyungsoo’s looking a bit green from all the jolting, and he buries his face in Chanyeol’s chest. The latter looks up at Jongin and smiles sympathetically - “Jongin, bud, it’s really just getting to know them. I promise you Yifan would love you if he knew anything about you!”

At the end of the conversation, Jongin had learned some things:

Kyungsoo chose a job that requires you to be in a car all day despite having car sickness.  
Chanyeol found it cute.  
Love can come with time.

⇲

Jongin’s decision has consequences, as one might imagine, and most of them are ridiculously awkward encounters with Yifan. He’s pretty sure his bus mates are actually keeping tabs on how many times he fizzles out during those conversations, and he doesn’t appreciate it.

The day after the conversation in the bus with lovebirds Chanyeol and Kyungsoo, Jongin somehow musters up enough courage to walk up to Yifan at the end of his emergency room shift, and strike up a conversation as he signed out at the reception desk. Jongin had opened with the timeless “Whatcha up to, Yifan?,” and the latter had responded with a deadpan “Leaving.” Jongin tries desperately to keep the conversation up, but it’s futile, and the chatter ends a couple phrases later with strained chuckles and blushing cheeks from the both of them.

A week later, it’s Yifan who initiates a discussion, and Jongin almost has a heart attack when the doctor sneaks up behind him as he’s doing paperwork in the cafeteria. There’s little talk, but both of their cheeks are bright red the whole time, and neither of them get very much done. It’s so obvious that a couple of front desk ladies two tables over start chuckling about it, and then it reaches the cafeteria ladies, who tell the med students, who pass it on to the nurses, who spread the news amongst themselves until it reaches the hospital’s Gossip King, Oh Sehun, who convenes an ER nurse emergency meeting to deal with it.

It’s way more official than it might sound - they manage to sneak into the conference room that the neurologists use to discuss patients. Sehun’s at the head of the table, with Jongdae and Baekhyun, the sassy scrub nurse from orthopedics, at either side. The boss (both Jongdae and Baekhyun grumble at this self-given title, but Sehun uses it nonetheless) begins with a somber “Men, something needs to be done.” The others roll their eyes for the umpteenth time, but the meeting ends up being productive - if using part of their sleep break to engineer their coworkers’ love lives can even be productive, that is.

“Is this even going to work?” Baekhyun traces over their plans with his pen, following the wild arrows and the weird scribbles marked all over the back of an empty form. “I mean, this seems like it’s straight out of a drama.”

Sehun is confident: “Desperate sexual tension calls for desperate measures, my friend.”

⇲

When he walks into work on Monday, everybody’s eyes are on Yifan. And no, he’s not imagining it. As soon as he walked out on the floor, every nurse, every secretary, and even some of his fellow surgeons turned to look at him. Maybe it is just his imagination, he didn’t sleep well last night.

He goes through a few of easy cases - two homeless men with diabetes, one dislocated shoulder, and a nasty cut courtesy of a falling kitchen knife. Not to sound pretentious, but he feels as if his name is being said everywhere; it’s subtle, but his hearing is astute enough to catch a regular “Dr. Wu” fluttering among the beds and between the curtains.

⇲

Jongin gets woken up at 5:00am not by his alarm, but by a text from Joonmyun.

“Kyungsoo is out sick today, bus 65 is a man down. Get your ass up and be at the hospital in half an hour.”

He stumbles into the unit late, rubbing his eyes and scratching at his bedhead. He doesn’t even get to say hello before he’s mobbed by Chanyeol and Joonmyun, who are yelling way too loud for 5:51. Jongin gets pushed to the back room, with both of his coworkers shrieking something about ‘paperwork’ and ‘backlog’ and ‘so so many things to file that you’re definitely not going to even be done today.’ He sits down in the squeaky swivel chair and sighs at the stack of reports that seems to touch the ceiling.

⇲

By 5:00pm, Yifan’s worked a twelve-hour shift and is an inch away from insanity. The whole day everyone’s kept him at arm’s length - nobody says hi in the hallway, the radio’s dead, Jongdae refrains from shouting phrases that get him meetings with HR (side note: Yifan no longer pays attention to these because he knows Jongdae is just trying to get into the pants of the Human Rights manager Minseok). It’s as if he’s invisible.

Exhausted and frustrated, he wanders to his office to get his briefcase.

⇲

Jongin’s on the last stack of papers, which are quite ironically all of Yifan’s ER cases, when Baekhyun and Sehun burst in and drag him out of the room. He’s too surprised to process that virtually the whole nursing staff is waiting outside and follows them.

Sehun nods to Jongdae, who nods back tersely and brings his radio to his lips. “You in your office?”

A couple of tense seconds pass until the radio crackles to life. “I’m heading there right now. Why?”

“I’ve got a few case files.”

Jongin, in the meanwhile, is fascinated as the whole army of medical professionals storms the staff hallways, dead silent and at an alarming speed. They end up in an office, with two nurses stationed at each end of the hallway to give the alarm.

“Would you mind telling me what the fuck you’re doing?” Jongin protests as his two friends plop him down in the chair behind the desk, but neither of them waste any time answering him as they duck behind the desk. “Would you two get up and ans-”

⇲

Yifan walks into his office, switches on the lights, and almost simultaneously has a heart attack.

Jongin is sitting in his office chair in a rumpled t-shirt and messy hair, eyes wide open as he looks at Yifan in the doorway. Arguably though, what actually gave the doctor palpitations was the fact that about thirty ER technicians of various types jumped up when he opened the door and yelled, “Kiss already!”

There are banners hanging around the room with heart-shaped balloons, and soft piano in the background, and wow this must have definitely been the work of Sehun because nothing else would be so over-the-top. Yifan would like to spend more time wondering how the hell they managed this, but manages to be more interested in the fact that Jongin’s cheeks are so red they might explode, and he’s pretty sure his face is not much different.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Jongdae comes out from behind the desk and pushes Yifan towards Jongin.

“Jongin, is it not true that you hang around the ER after your shift with the excuse of paperwork so you can see this man right here?” A shy nod is enough for Yifan’s heart rate to shoot through the roof.

“And Yifan, is it not true that you are a professional at stalking Jongin’s Facebook photos?” Yifan murmurs something about how he had said that in confidence, but agrees nonetheless.

“Well then, I declare you mutual crushes, and if you don’t go on a date and declare your undying love for each other right now, this whole ER is going to spontaneously combust from all this sexual tension.” There are words of agreement coming from the crowd and Yifan briefly wonders how obvious his attraction was before he hears Jongin say okay.

Yifan’s smile tears through his cheeks, and he doesn’t get the chance to say yes back because the medical crowd around him starts oohing and aahing, and Jongdae starts shrieking about how he finally got his Adonis, and Baekhyun pinches his cheeks, and Sehun bursts in with a cake that has Jongfan written in frosting.

“Wait!”

Joonmyun yells and somehow freezes the commotion. “Shouldn’t we let him answer?”

The throng of staff turn their heads to Yifan, who grins and says “How could I say no?”

The ensuing party is something out of a drama, with streamers and cake and hugging and Jongin clinging to Yifan’s side, nuzzling his head into his shoulder to hide his blush when somebody teases them. It’s almost like they’re married.

They will be in about two years anyway though, so what’s the hurry?

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. If the ending doesn't make it obvious, they get married two years after this insane little party. They invite everyone who helped shove them together.
> 
> 2\. Their couple nickname around the hospital is "Jongfan" thanks to Sehun's obnoxious cake, which Yifan hates but Jongin secretely adores. 
> 
> 3\. Sehun only requested that name in frosting because the decoration was pay-by-the-letter, and he was too stingy to pay for "Jongin and Yifan".
> 
> 4\. Minseok eventually gives in to Jongdae, which is a positive for their relationship and for Jongdae's bulking HR violations folder.


End file.
